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Re/Designing Trust in Action Lab: Health & Healthcare


Trust can’t be prescribed—but it can be designed.

The health system’s history of harm has left deep scars. From patient care to public health outreach, communities are demanding more than access—they’re demanding accountability. In the Re/Designing Trust in Action Lab, health professionals, system leaders, and community advocates come together to rebuild relationships through equity-centered strategies. Co-design solutions that restore dignity, improve outcomes, and make trust a measurable part of healthcare delivery.

Example Trust Redesign Opportunities in Health and Healthcare:

  • Patients from BIPOC and immigrant communities report recurring dismissal of symptoms and pain, but feel there’s no safe channel for accountability.

    Providers rely on diagnostic algorithms that underdiagnose certain conditions in Black, Indigenous, and Latino/a/e/x patients, exacerbating health disparities.

    Communities with histories of medical racism (e.g., sterilization, experimentation, neglect) avoid care due to deep mistrust.

    Patients experiencing trauma report feeling retraumatized by chaotic, impersonal, and security-heavy ER environments.

    Vaccine campaigns and public health alerts are met with skepticism and misinformation in underinvested communities.

    Health apps and patient portals often fail to serve low-literacy users, older adults, and uninsured patients, thereby widening the digital divide/apartheid.

    Hospital boards and leadership teams lack input from the very communities most impacted by health disparities.

Healing Starts with Trust.

For patients to heal, they must first be heard. In a field marked by racial, gender, and disability disparities and institutional harm, this Action Lab brings together health providers, public health leaders, and patient advocates to co-create systems of care rooted in dignity, equity, and trust. It’s time to treat trust as a health outcome.

Across four powerful days, reimagine systems of care alongside the people they’re meant to serve. Develop policies, protocols, and healing-centered practices that respect lived experiences, address past harms, and rebuild trust in institutions that have too often caused harm. Health and healthcare can heal—but only if we redesign them for dignity and equity.

The Re/Designing Trust Action Lab: Health & Healthcare will culminate in co-created trust-based interventions that will be publicly disseminated to drive industry-wide systems change.

This is not a retreat. It’s a reckoning. Walk in with a problem. Walk out with a plan—and a community.

Rebuilding Trust in Health & Healthcare Begins  Here.

By the end of the Re/Designing Trust Action Lab: Health & Healthcare, participants will be able to:

  • Identify historical and systemic injustices—such as medical racism, forced sterilizations, health redlining, and clinical bias—that have contributed to deep-rooted mistrust between healthcare systems and excluded and underinvested communities.
  • Examine their roles, decision-making authority, and institutional power within health systems, and how their identities and positions impact trust and access in patient care, public health, and medical research.
  • Co-create trust-centered healthcare interventions that directly respond to historical and contemporary harms experienced by underinvested patients and communities.
  • Develop actionable strategies for long-term community engagement that move beyond token advisory boards or outreach campaigns to authentic, patient- and community-driven systems of care.
  • Strengthen their capacity to embed dignity and trust into healthcare systems by reimagining how care practices, health communications, and clinical policies can repair harm, restore relationships, and earn sustained community trust.

By the end of the Re/Designing Trust Action Lab: Health & Healthcare experience, graduates will receive:

  • Invitation to the Institute of Equitable Design and Justice online network, including a private online community of practice for the Re/Designing Trust Lab alumni

  • Alumni-only virtual gatherings

  • Access to Lab Report Newsletter

  • Certificate of Completion

  • Name acknowledgment in sector-specific Re/Designing Trust in Action Lab Trust Report

  • Bonus: Redesigners for Justice™ Participation Pin and Sticker

  • Bonus: Equity-Centered Community Design™ 1.0 field guide (by Creative Reaction Lab)

  • Bonus: Nature of Trust Bio 360 Report (by Biomimicry 3.8 & Biomimicry for Social Innovation)

$2,444 per person
$444 or $0 for Living Impact Expert

Buy One, Sponsor One: Each full-price registration covers your tuition and also sponsors a complimentary ticket for a living expert—an individual directly impacted by the industry of focus who does not work within it.

During registration, you may nominate a qualified living expert or designate someone to receive your sponsored ticket. Student participants can receive volunteer hours for participation in the program.

If you’re a living impact expert, learn more about and/or apply for a Gertrude Jackson Scholarship (full scholarship) and Jack Burke Scholarship (partial scholarship) below.

Refund Policy
Living Impact Scholarship Application
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June 24

Re/Designing Trust in Action Lab: Education

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September 16

Re/Designing Trust in Action Lab: Media & Journalism